People & Places

Best Bacon Lady Phoenix 2009 - Heather Lauer

Heather Lauer wasn't always into porcine belly meat. As the author/blogger told a correspondent for www.mrbaconpants.com last May, her infatuation with the heart-stopping delight began in the summer of 2005, when the then-partner at a D.C. consulting firm and her brothers got drunk, tipsily lit on the subject of bacon, and came up with the appellation "Best Meat Ever."

"The next day, when I was sober, I still thought it was a good idea — perhaps the first time that has ever happened after a night of drinking," says Lauer, who now splits time between Arizona and her native Idaho. "I fired up blogger.com and thus began baconunwrapped.com."

Four years later, riding the crest of the social-networking wave, her blog about the doings of "Bacon Nation" is going strong, and her first book, Bacon: A Love Story — A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat, garnered a largely favorable response when it was released in May '09.

Though she took up bacon idolatry as a joke, Lauer's serious as a heart attack about her mission: detailing America's fascination with the crispy breakfast staple. Both the blog and the book are chock-full of recipes, gossip, history, and high-on-the-hog arcana, and the site is brimming with tweets and posts along the lines of "Bacon Wrapped Tater Tots," "Diet Coke with Bacon," "Bacon Candy Bar," and "Baconvision: Jim Gaffigan on Bacon."

As hard as it is to believe, waxing rhapsodic about bacon doesn't pay the bills, so Lauer focuses on cured pork strips when she gets off her day job at Tribe Effect, a socially conscious public-affairs consulting firm that she co-founded.